[WEB4LIB] HTML assistance followup

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin L Zalben" <zalbenrl at alverno.edu>
Subject: [WEB4LIB] HTML assistance followup

> I have the graphic on the page, but it shows up as a new graphic in each
> block of the table---regardless of what I do. (Sizing it doesn't work,
> and it doesn't matter if I put it in the TD before or in the Table tag
> itself.  Take a look at http://depts.alverno.edu/library/library.html
>

That's one of the more serious drawbacks to using proprietary markup:
without an authoritative definition of what <table background=...> should
do, you can't rely on different browsers interpreting it the same way--or
at least, you can't lay blame when they differ.  IE5 uses one copy of the
image for the whole table; Netscape 4.7 and Mozilla m14 use individual,
cropped copies for each table cell; Opera ignores the background attribute
altogether.  I have to say, only Opera's rendition keeps the maroon text
and blue links really legible.  If you're committed to having links float
over a picture of your reference shelf, why not avoid the whole table
problem and make it an image map?  Then you could use any number of
techniques to keep the text legible too.

[Style sheet note: pseudo-elements are noted with a colon, not a period.
So a:visited rather than a.visited.]

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu